Doxa and Reflexitity

“They know immediately, but they don’t know that they know.”
“Rationality has its own reflexivity, and vice versa.”

Doxa implies a knowledge, a practical knowledge. Workers know a lot: more
than any intellectual, more than any sociologist. But in a sense they don’t
know it, they lack the instrument to grasp it, to speak about it. (Bourdieu and
Eagleton, 1999: 273) (Doxa and common life)
Experience arises spontaneously within social being, but it does not arise
without thought: it arises because men and women (and not only philoso-
phers) are rational, and they think about what is happening to themselves
and their world. [. . .] For we cannot conceive of any form of social being
independently of its organizing concepts and expectations, nor could social
being reproduce itself for a day without thought. (Thompson, 1978: 8) (The Making of the English working class)
Pascalian Meditations:
“ Habermas and Foucault…heroes of two movements called ‘ modern’ and ‘ post-modern’-
on one side, Habermas juridico-discursive conception, which asserts the autonomous force of
law and seeks to found democracy on legal institutionalisation of the forms of communication
which are necessary to the formation of rational will; on the other side, Foucault’s analysis
of power, which , observing the microstructures of domination and the strategies of the
struggle for power, leads to a rejection of universals and in particular of the search of any
kind of universally acceptable morality. “ (Bourdieu: 107)
” Ceasing to be embodied in persons or institutions, power is differentiated and dispersed
(this is probably what Michel Foucault meant to suggest, no doubt in opposition to the
Marxist vision of the centralized, monolithical apparatus, with his rather vague metaphor
of ‘capillarity)” (102)
‘Reproduction interdite. La dimension symbolique de la domination symbolique’.
“ I would like to underscore the whole difference which separates the theory of symbolic
violence as misrecognition based upon the unconscious adjustment of the subjective
structures to the objective structures from the theory of Foucault concerning domination
conceived of as discipline and dressage, or in another domain, the whole difference which
separates the metaphors of Foucault like the open and capillary network from the concept
of field. “(245)